Friday, September 14, 2012

“I
need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I
couldn’t exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels
are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.”

—Caitlin
R. Kiernan.

This is
a pretty good quote to frame most things, IMNSHO, but definitely to
frame my most recent piece of news: I finally have an official
deadline for the first draft of my new book, Experimental Film: A
Novel. Said deadline is September, 2013, which is...crazy, frankly.
Still, I needed a good ass-kick to get me over the threshold with
this project, and that certainly qualifies.

Without
giving much away, Experimental Film is a story that's about as
far removed from the Hexslinger-'verse as is humanly possible. It
exists as an outgrowth of my “Toronto Dark” world, the one many
of my short stories are set in, contemporary and urban and
stand-alone. On the one hand, there's an M.R. Jamesian ghost
story/mystery whose roots date back to the end of the 19th
century and the beginning of cinema; on the other, there's a
character who's not quite me, other characters who aren't quite
various figures from the Toronto experimental film scene, and a lot
of the stuff about Canadian film history I used to inflict on my
students. It's stuff I've touched on before, most recently in the
2010 Shirley Jackson Award-nominated novelette Steve and I wrote
together (“each thing I show you is a piece of my death”), but
since I've never had to spin it out for 80,000 to 100,000 words before, it's quite fairly terrifying to contemplate. But
energizing.

In other
news I should have been linking to this blog, I've been writing a
bi-weekly column on...gee, let's call it “horror culture”, for
ChiZine.com. The current one is “Softly Brutal: The Gialli of Pupi
Avati”, but you should be able to link the the rest though this
(http://www.chizine.com/pupi_avati.htm#.UFNQoY7FUfE).
For those who are interested, I also now have a Tumblr, here
(http://handful-ofdust.tumblr.com/), which I mainly use to file
odd-ass visual stuff I find inspiring. You'll see some mood-building
stuff for Experimental Film up there already, and can expect to see
more.

Homepage of writer Gemma Files

Yet More Opening of the Mouth

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About Me

Award-winning horror author Gemma Files is also a film critic, teacher, screenwriter, Writer's Guild of Canada member, wife and mother. In 1999, her story "The Emperor's Old Bones" won an International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction. She sold five of her stories to erotic horror anthology TV series THE HUNGER, produced by Ridley and Tony Scott's Scott Free production company. She wrote the Series Two episodes "Bottle of Smoke" and "The Diarist" herself. Her first novel, A BOOK OF TONGUES, is available right now from ChiZine Publications. It will be followed by two sequels, A ROPE OF THORNS (2011) and A TREE OF BONES (2012). Gemma Files can be contacted at filesgemma@gmail.com